Can anything good come out of hate? Maybe. The imminent release of Watchmen the movie finally pushed me into reading Alan Moore's classic and I have to confess that my desire to hate the movie with impunity had a lot to do with me reading the graphic novel.
Only a willful contrariness (or laziness perhaps) can account for my failure to acquaint myself with Moore's tale of the superhero gone to seed*. Goodness knows it's been influential enough. Images from the comic were inescapable as I read comics in the 90s, eventually coming to be quite influential in my own daydreams featuring myself, or some other version of me, as a masked adventurer. There were in fact several owl-boys who popluated my superhero-dominated imagination.
Anyway, I've done it. I've read it. And it's good. Very. The universe Moore creates for the reader is very well realized, even without the slightly exhausting and unecessary fictional extracts and documents which end each installment. The dialogue is a bit portentious at times, and the 'mature' nature of the content is needlessly foregrounded (obsiously in an attempt to explicitly seperate Watchmen from the more pulpy adventures published by DC) - the result being that there are passages that feel a little contrived. And I tend to agree with a recent review commenting that the comic's denouement reads as slight naive and fanciful. The idea that mankind would suddenly abandon all intra-species conflic in the face of an alien invasion stratches the limits of credibility, but doesn't seem entirely out of place within the narrative to be absolutely fair.
What works:
Dr Manhattan is terrifying.
The scenes with Rorschach and the neon lighting outside the hoodlum's apartment are great.
Silk Spectre is a wonderful character. Selfish and self-absorbed in a wonderfully realistic way.
Anyway, have to dash, more coming soon...
*On this topic, it's interesting to think of The Incredibles as a sunnier version of the same story.
NEW: here are two scans from the book. One of them is interesting for its cinematic quality, the neon switching on and off in time with Rorschach's step is awkward but also ambitious. Not sure it really works. The other scan is from a bit near the end where Ozymandias sets off his alien-bomb-teleportation thingy. Through most of the book the newsagent and the kid reading the pirate comic next to the newstand have a pretty indifferent/antogonistic relationship and the way they move towards each other in the face of their imminent death is pretty poignant. The plain white panel to end the issue is also quite effective, no? Oh, wait, I already have images of those panels...oh well.
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